the only vista ill have is one of a burning pile of installation cd's

I had forceware driver problems, detailed in the 'System Instability' thread. I downgraded to 177.89 (pre-physX) and it seems to have sorted a lot of problems out.

The scary thing for me is that I'm suddenly getting better performance in Vista than XP now on the whole!
-especially recent;y with TR underworld which flys along with AA and ani in Vista but struggles with even 2x in XP.

Something must be afoot if a 'Vista' is beating XP! (probably my insistence to dual boot off the same drive )

I Tried 177.89 after i got a freeze and stuttering sound last night (again...sigh). Its definitely worse than 177.92 for me - within 20 mins of playing it was locking up and crashing to desktop. Back to 177.92 again now.

Khola it sounds like youve either installed a crap chipset driver or a dodgy graphics driver or something. There's no way Vista should be noticeably faster than XP. Maybe slightly (given 4gb of ram etc etc), but tbh I'd expect XP to beat vista in gaming anyway.

It may have been I set up the dual boot slightly differently to last time maybe?

Instead of installing the Vista, shrinking and making an NTFS partition there, then re-booting to install XP and finally fixing the boot.

This time I started with 2 empty partions at the start and installed seperately. I also used EasyBCD this time instead of Vistaboot pro- as they have started charging. I'm sure I could type out the paths in BCDedit if i had to.

As you say- chipset. I had thought my board a 680i as you know (indeed it says it is on support CD and manual etc )... Perhaps I've installed the wrong Nforce components along the way- although I'm always curious as to how necessary these are other than their networking components

Youd be proud of my PiLsY I did my first clock to 2.63 and ran Tomb raider for 1/2 hour fine.
On reboot though I was hitting black screens- so something needs amping up right? or I'm restrained by power.